Heuristics, Cognitive Bias, and Ethics in the Workplace (2024)

FAQs

What are cognitive biases and heuristics? ›

Gonzalez (2017, p. 251) also described the difference between the two terms: “Heuristics are the 'shortcuts' that humans use to reduce task complexity in judgment and choice, and biases are the resulting gaps between normative behavior and the heuristically determined behavior.”

The halo effect

This form of cognitive bias at work is basically when we associate positive traits with other positive traits, and negative traits with negative ones. A popular example is that we're more likely to believe that someone is a good person if we find them attractive.

When you see a person with their hood up in a dark alley and you decide to subtly walk past a bit faster, your brain has probably used a heuristic to evaluate the situation instead of a full thought-out deliberation process.

Example: Cognitive bias One common manifestation of cognitive bias is the stereotype that women are less competent or less committed to their jobs. These stereotypes may linger in managers' subconscious, influencing their hiring and promoting decisions. This, in turn, can lead to workplace discrimination.

Confirmation bias, sampling bias, and brilliance bias are three examples that can affect our ability to critically engage with information. Jono Hey of Sketchplanations walks us through these cognitive bias examples, to help us better understand how they influence our day-to-day lives.

It's easy to selectively focus on certain results, often ignoring important elements that had a bigger impact on the final result. So taking time to reflect, as a group, can be a great method of understanding what went wrong or right, and helping to challenge any cognitive bias before it is formed.

Examples of Affect Heuristic

A person is stuck in traffic and makes an impulsive decision to take the other route even though you don't know the way. Someone is offered a job and accepts it without further details. A family chooses to move to another country without being familiar with the language, culture or area.

What problems can be solved by heuristics? ›

Heuristic methods are reliable and convenient mental shortcuts that you can use to narrow down your options when you're faced with several different choices, to ease your cognitive load , or to solve problems. Perhaps you're a hiring manager, and you decide to dismiss any résumés that contain spelling mistakes.

Heuristics allow people to go beyond their cognitive limits. Heuristics are also advantageous when speed or timeliness matters—for example, deciding to enter a trade or making a snap judgment about some important decision. Heuristics are thus handy when there is no time to carefully weigh all options and their merits.

Think of heuristics like guidelines, or rules of thumb: they're usually good enough most of the time, but they can result in errors. Cognitive biases are systematic errors in thinking that interfere with how we reason, process information, and perceive reality.

Ethical cognitivists hold that ethical sentences do express propositions: that it can be true or false, for example, that Mary is a good person, or that stealing and lying are always wrong.

Cognitive bias is a systematic thought process caused by the tendency of the human brain to simplify information processing through a filter of personal experience and preferences.

Cognitive heuristics is an umbrella term for the day-to-day decision-making strategies that everyone uses to make the best possible choices available.

The availability heuristic is a cognitive bias in which you make a decision based on an example, information, or recent experience that is that readily available to you, even though it may not be the best example to inform your decision (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973).

Heuristics (from Ancient Greek εὑρίσκω, heurískō, "I find, discover") is the process by which humans use mental shortcuts to arrive at decisions. Heuristics are simple strategies that humans, animals, organizations, and even machines use to quickly form judgments, make decisions, and find solutions to complex problems.